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THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

MARTIE THE UNCONQUERED

VOLUME VIII

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO

JOSEPH SEXTON THOMPSON

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

At about four o'clock on a windy, warm September afternoon, four girls
came out of the post office of Monroe, California. They had loitered on
their way in, consciously wasting time; they had spent fifteen minutes
in the dark and dirty room upon an absolutely unnecessary errand, and
now they sauntered forth into the village street keenly aware that the
afternoon was not yet waning, and disheartened by the slow passage of
time. At five they would go to Bonestell's drug store, and sit in a row
at the soda counter, and drink effervescent waters pleasingly mingled
with fruit syrups and an inferior quality of ice cream. Five o'clock
was the hour for "sodas," neither half past four nor half past five was
at all the same thing in the eyes of Monroe's young people. After that
they would wander idly toward the bridge, and separate; Grace Hawkes
turning toward the sunset for another quarter of a mile, Rose Ransome
opening the garden gate of the pretty, vine covered cottage near the
bridge, and the Monroe girls, Sarah and Martha, in a desperate hurry
now, flying up the twilight quiet of North Main Street to the long
picket fence, the dark, tree shaded garden, and the shabby side doorway
of the old Monroe house.

Three of these girls met almost every afternoon, going first to each
other's houses, and later wandering down for the mail, for some trivial
errand at drug store or dry goods store, and for the inevitable ices.
Rose Ransome was not often with them, for Rose was just a little
superior in several ways to her present companions, and frequently
spent the afternoon practising on her violin, or driving, or walking
with the Parker girls and Florence Frost, who hardly recognized the
existence of Grace Hawkes and the Monroes. The one bank in Monroe was
the Frost and Parker Bank; there were Frost Street and Parker Street,
the Frost Building and the Parker Building. May and Ida Parker and
Florence Frost had gone to Miss Bell's Private School when they were
little, and then to Miss Spencer's School in New York.

But even all this might not have accounted for the exclusive social
instincts of the young ladies if both families had not been very rich.
As it was, with prosperous fathers and ambitious mothers, with
well kept, old fashioned homes, pews in church, allowances of so many
hundred dollars a year, horses to ride and drive, and servants to wait
upon them, the three daughters of these two prominent families
considered themselves as obviously better than their neighbours, and
bore themselves accordingly. Cyrus Frost and Graham Parker had come to
California as young men, in the seventies; had cast in their lot with
little Monroe, and had grown rich with the town. It was a credit to the
state now; they had found it a mere handful of settlers' cabins, with
one stately, absurd mansion standing out among them, in a plantation of
young pepper and willow and locust and eucalyptus trees.

This was the home of Malcolm Monroe, turreted, mansarded, generously
filled with the glass windows that had come in a sailing vessel around
the Horn. Incongruous, pretentious, awkward, it might to a discerning
eye have suggested its owner, who was then not more than thirty years
old; a tall, silent, domineering man. He was reputed rich, and Miss
Elizabeth or "Lily" Price, a pretty Eastern girl who visited the
Frosts in the winter of 1878, was supposed to be doing very well for
herself when she married him, and took her bustles and chignons, her
blonde hair with its "French twist," and her scalloped, high buttoned
kid shoes to the mansion on North Main Street.

Now the town had grown to several hundred times its old size; schools,
churches, post office, shops, a box factory, a lumber yard, and a
winery had come to Monroe. There was the Town Hall, a plain wooden
building, and, at the shabby outskirts of South Main Street, a jail... Continue reading book >>